A speech worth reading from Nick Clegg

Given how critical I have been of Nick Clegg during his leadership campaign, it would be churlish if I didn't link to his Social Market Foundation speech on public service reform.

It's really good and pretty radical. I wonder if the Liberals will support him on it. Certainly it does what I hoped for when he announced his candidacy - suggest the possibility of a policy alliance on the centre right in favour of public service reform.

Worth reading.

(via Robert Sharp)

Comments

[Dave Bartlett]

I don't see how this speech suggests "the possibility of a policy alliance on the centre right in favour of public service reform."

While the words 'decentralisatin' and 'localism' have passed the lips of a number of conservative MPs, the policy proposals that come from CCHQ all seem to be intended to increase centralisation.

[CT Barbarian]

The rest of the LibDems won't let Clegg come within a mile of implementing this. There's nothing here (NHS aside) that a Conservative Republican couldn't agree (and we all know what neolithic troglodytes we all are!)

I trust that, with all this talk of decentralization, someone will remind Mr. Clegg of this speech the next time the LibDems shout "Post Code Lottery"

[Julian Cox]

I note with some satisfaction that the weighty words of this prime-minister-in-waiting have provoked the fevered comment of no less than two persons. And that is as it should be.

Aside from the platitudinous ideological soundness of the received wisdoms of our age parotted unthinkingly by members of the Liberal Democrat Party, it remains an organization that is evenly divided between recalcitrant middle class socialists who cannot abide the residual, "h" dropping working class clannishness of Labour and its patronizing, under-educated yet over-schooled middle-class Conservatives who resent David Cameron for being the genuine article at one and the same time as they find the likes of William Hague utterly provincial and more than somewhat common. It is a heart-felt dilemma for both wings of the party and but I have no sympathy for them in their in joint and several agonies. As a result of being unable to dress to the left or to the right, Clegg, like all Liberals, will find that he has no option but to sit on his best asset and the proposals he makes here will go as far as Charles Kennedy on a short walk after a long drink down a dark alley.

Anyone for tennis?

[Simon]

Great speech from Clegg. Brown has no charisma, and Cameron is pretty, oh so pretty, vacant, so Clegg might just be able to combine politics and policy in a compelling way that we don't have at the moment.